health care reform
From FDR's New Deal to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the United States government has attempted to centralize extensive social policies. In the early eighties, when recession and inflation were at a high, Ronald Reagan took office and pronounced that the federal government needed to take a lesser role in the lives of the American people. As Theda Skocpol comments in her book Boomerang: Clinton's Health Security Effort and the Turn Against Government in U.S. Politics, the Reagan administration instilled a dislike of centralized government in the American people. This was a major reason, according to Skocpol, why the Clinton Administration failed to nationalize "Health Security". It was this fear of centralized government and Clinton's failure to reform Health Care that makes a more centralized social policy unlikely in the near future. There has been a necessity in the twentieth century (due in part to the Great Depression and World War II) for big government. The legislation behind Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal called for the involvement of the federal government to create a highly bureaucratic social policy. The combination of Roosevelt's political assertiveness and society's willingness to allow such centralization t
The inability of the White House to overcome this trend makes such grandiose reforms unlikely. Skocpol agrees with this assertion when she says "In the wake of failed Health Security effort of 1993-94 and the anti-governmental backlash it helped fuel, there is no prospect of starting again..." Even with the prospect of a democratic White House and Congress in 2000, such a highly bureaucratic and federally complicated bill does not seem likely in the near future. Furthermore, with the budget surplus causing political gridlock, it is apparent that the democrats will not be able to use the economic surplus for any new government programs. In a time of economic prosperity, where the mailman has four televisions in his three-story house, the American public would rather invest in the stock market than big government. In the eighties Ronald Reagan came into power and instilled an intense fear of big government into the American people. As Theda Skocpol says "...debt and disillusionment with the federal government were growing before the 1980s. But the republican ascendancy of that decade exploded the deficit and deliberately encouraged cynicism about public efforts to address national problems." The Reagan administration worked to cut taxes and spending on what was called "wasteful" government prog
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 884
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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